It's clear to anybody with a knowledge of skateboarding that the team behind the original OlliOlli understood the sport at the centre of their game.

Roll7's console debut, despite abstracting its subject matter into a 2D twitch side-scroller, captured the rhythm and flow of skateboarding, right down to its use of kinetic energy and the sheer presence of those landings. Retreating from realism, OlliOlli got closer to what is at the heart of skateboarding than most other games could dream of. And it happened to be a damn fine example of modern twitch, too.

A little over a year later, and OlliOlli's sequel is here. Much will be overtly familiar to those who lost hours to the first game, as Roll7 have wisely taken the path of refinement. Even so, it's worth heading back in.

I'm joined by Thomas was Alone creator Mike Bithell to take a look at the latest build of Volume, his upcoming stealth game that has lots of famous people's voices in it.

I think it's worth watching just to hear Mike's exasperation as I misunderstand the layout of his levels, but you may also enjoy some of the discussion surrounding the game's initial design and inspirations. Either way, it should give you a good idea of what to expect from Volume, ahead of its eventual release this year:

The mod in question, Fluffy Manager 5000, still has a few kinks to work out regarding this new feature. For one, it's only effective with gamepads. "Keyboard/mouse controls always affect both players, so it's not usable," Sectus noted in his YouTube notes. Furthermore, the local co-op option still isn't available in Raid mode, though Sectus said he's working on implementing that.

La-Mulana, a game that can only be described as "Fez meets Dark Souls," is coming to Vita on 4th March (or 3rd March in North America) in a spruced up edition entitled La-Mulana EX.

The colossal metroidvania that combines expansive, obtuse puzzles with excessively deadly enemies was initially released in 2005 as a free PC game in Japan, but was remade into a commercial product where it came to WiiWare in 2012 and Steam in 2013. Now Vita players will get a chance to fail at developer Nigoro's fiendishly difficult expedition.

Port developer Pygmy Studio worked with Nigoro on this enhanced edition that makes the game a tad more accessible without making it noticeably easier. As detailed on the PlayStation Blog, there's now a Monster Bestiary to check out details on the creatures you come across, and some puzzles have been slightly adjusted to make more sense.

Steam users and North American PlayStation players will receive it a day earlier on 14th April.

Developed by Chroma designer Mark Foster and his colleagues at Acid Nerve, Titan Souls tasks players with slaying 20 giants in an otherwise uninhabited wasteland. You get one hit point and one arrow. Good luck!

The first episode of Resident Evil Revelations 2 is out now on all platforms, and you'll be able to pick up the remaining three episodes over the next few weeks. It's certainly a bold new approach for the series, and whether the game suffers from being separated into two-hour doses is something we won't be able to judge until we have our hands on March's concluding episode.

Between now and then though, we're putting together a walkthrough to help you navigate the puzzles and perplexities of each episode on a week by week basis. We'll make sure this guide is fully updated to match the release dates of each chapter, so don't forget to check back as the staggered release plays out.

Those who purchase Hotline Miami 2's standard edition will receive the Hotline Miami Mask Pack which includes six masks.

Purchasing the Hotline Miami 2: Special Edition grants players the Character Jacket Pack. This includes the above along with the "Jacket" protagonist of the first Hotline Miami, an additional mask called “Richard Returns", a "Sociopath perk deck" and two new weapons: the "Carpenter's Delight hammer" and Jacket's submachine gun with its accompanying weapon modifications.

Renegade Kid's sci-fi metroidvania Xeodrifter is coming to PS4 and Vita this April via a new publishing deal with Gambitious Digital Entertainment.

Released on 3DS and PC in December, Xeodrifter merges the minimalist 2D platforming of Renegade Kid's earlier Mutant Mudds with the more ambitious open-world exploration of Metroid.

To further celebrate Xeodrifter's branching out, Gambitious just released the game's Special Edition on Steam. This adds an in-depth development diary and soundtrack by chiptune artists Roth Sothy, Matthew Gambrell and Brian Altano.

Developer Futurlab confirmed that it will be handling the ports' development, while Sierra just handles the business side of publishing - something Futurlab considers a win-win.

"Self publishing is HARD," said Futurlab's James Marsden in a blog post. "I spent more time doing PR and marketing on Velocity 2X than I spent designing levels. I became a bottleneck for the whole project. That was far from ideal.

]]>http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-02-25-velocity-2x-is-coming-to-xbox-one-pc-mac-and-linux
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1739111Wed, 25 Feb 2015 17:47:00 +0000Video: Pointing, poking and perishing - Resident Evil Revelations 2 gameplay highlightsThe first episode of Resident Evil: Revelations 2 is out right now, much to the delight of Barry Burton fans worldwide. Ian gave it a go during one of our live streams and, well, things got a bit weird. Get ready for a lot of shooting, a fair amount of dying horribly, and a surprising amount of role-playing as a little girl. Oh, and some Cliff Richard.

You can tell pretty much everything you need to know about a game from its jump mechanics, whether it's contemporary Grand Theft Auto's slapstick tumble, the perfect bound in a Mario game or the cotton-soft float of Sackboy. The jump in Scram Kitty, a former Wii U exclusive that's now on its way to PS4 and Vita, was always a bit harder to read: a strange arc subject to the momentum you'd built up riding rails, and subject to the gravity of levels that would loop across the screen.

In that jump you'll see some of the impeccable taste of Scram Kitty's developer, Rhodri Broadbent, who worked at Lionhead and Q-Games before setting up Dakko Dakko. There's some of the inventiveness of Treasure, and the engineering precision of Nintendo. Its elasticity is initially unwieldy, which made it something of an acquired taste.

"It was made for people who like a challenge," Broadbent says over Skype as he prepares this week's release of Scram Kitty DX. "The thing is, we wanted to create a game that people who really wanted to master it could, and feel like they've achieved something, and that's exactly what we did and all the feedback suggests that. We didn't really take into consideration that a lot of people want to progress through a game without really mastering challenges, and that's fine - it's a different kind of game, and it meant some of the response was like 'whoa, this is a really hard game'. And fair enough, time is important to people and they don't want to spend it learning a crazy gravity system that's never been done before.

This is an early impressions piece based on playing through the first episode of Resident Evil Revelations 2. We'll have a full review once all episodes are live in the middle of March.

The first motivation behind a spin-off is money. But what comes after, especially if you're the creatives tasked with giving another angle on a popular series? In the case of Resident Evil: Revelations the answer was fan-service - albeit quality fan-service - with original protagonists Chris and Jill reunited, a cruise ship that somehow contained pieces of the Arklay Mansion, and a script so full of clunkers it almost seemed deliberate. Some Resident Evil spin-offs have been stinkers, but Revelations wasn't one of them - and this sequel might turn out to be even better.

I say 'might' because, with a first episode clocking in at just under two hours and a currently-offline Raid mode, Revelations 2's biggest problem is simply that it isn't complete. With the future episodes following over the course of the next month you wonder why this structure is being used at all, and it's doubly annoying that the retail release has significant exclusive content. It's as if Capcom is trying to discourage buying Revelations 2 on release, and encourage waiting. I don't get the strategy here, but whatever.

Poor old Q*bert. He may have been a minor celebrity in 1982, but his fame didn't have the staying power of Pac-Man and Space Invaders. In 2015, the hose-nosed squawking orange lump is more of a nostalgic footnote than an actual brand.

Through a series of unlikely corporate takeovers in the early 1980s, when Columbia briefly owned arcade company Gottlieb, the Q*bert character is actually now owned not by a games publisher, but by movie company Sony Pictures. Hence his cameo in Disney's Wreck-It Ralph, and his upcoming appearance in Sony's own arcade-themed CG movie Pixels this Christmas.

Scram Kitty DX, the enhanced version of last year's Wii U-exclusive platformer/shooter Scram Kitty and his Buddy on Rails, is out this week in Europe on PS4 and Vita.

Developed by Dakko Dakko (of The 2D Adventures of Rotating Octopus Character and Floating Cloud God Saves the Pilgrims fame), Scram Kitty DX merges platforming with top-down shooting as your character scrolls around various rails and uses magnets to propel themselves around various stages in an effort to rescue cats.

Our Simon Parkin called it "a wonderfully idiosyncratic creation that, despite its smorgasbord of influences, feels like nothing else" in his glowing Scram Kitty review. "It's a game built with admirable craft and singular focus, and it richly rewards your investment," he added.

As detailed on the PlayStation Blog, Happ noted that the game is entirely complete and through certification on PS4, but it's only the Vita version that is taking longer. "People who are mostly interested in the PS Vita version should not worry. It's definitely coming, and it's definitely going to be Cross-Buy," he stated. "So if you buy it on PS4, it will be ready for download on your Vita as soon as it launches there."

So if it's already completed on PS4, why won't it be out for another month plus? This buffer period is so reviewers won't be rushed going through the ambitious, secret-filled adventure. "There's a lot of content in Axiom Verge and I want to make sure reviewers have plenty of time to play through the entire game and savour the full experience," Happ explained. "I'm personally really proud of what I've been able to accomplish as a solo dev, so my emotions run the gamut between excitement about letting the rest of the world check it out, and anxiety over letting my baby take its first steps in the wild."

Hello! Chris Donlan here. David Goldfarb, our regular columnist, is away this week, so I've asked Rob Fearon to write something instead and he has very kindly agreed. Rob designs wonderful arcade games such as DRM (which does not include DRM) and he is also a brilliant writer. I know: what a massive jerk. I really hope you enjoy what he's come up with today. Also, look at THIS.

I grew up in an all too typical 1980's northern town. Factories closed, unemployment rose. First friends of the family left jobless, then my parents. The stinking grey skies a reminder that the wheels of industry still turned close, the lack of food in the cupboard and the tears and upset a constant reminder of how out of reach most work in the area remained.

I got a Spectrum when I was younger, before the work and the money ran dry. I'd rush home from school to play Jetpac, Jet Set Willy, Jumping Jack and other games beginning with J. I loved playing games but I never felt like I could actually write the things. Sure, I'd tinker with The Quill to make hilarious (not actually hilarious) adventure games (for the kids that's what we'd now call "interactive fiction" or what a subset of idiots would call "not a game"), then there was HURG, GAC and SEUCK and other tools with awful acronyms designed to help make making games easier. In the main they were too limited or too difficult for me to use. Besides, I really liked playing games and making them seriously cuts into the time you can spend doing that, yeah?

Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number now has a free digital comic that you can download on Steam.

Written and drawn by Dayjob Studios in preparation for this highly anticipated sequel, the comic will entail five episodes detailing the backstory of the game's several factions. The first issue covers the fervour around an animal mask-wearing gang and the second issue is about a Russian-hating hick and the mysterious organisation he belongs to, 50 Blessings.

Subsequent issues will be released as updates leading up to the game's release.

A school where kids make video games: we used to get the cane for even imagining that when I were a lad. That's why when "the UK's first gaming school" flashes across my inbox, I know I have to get to Liverpool to see it.

A brisk walk down the River Mersey, past the docks, past The Beatles Story, and I'm there. On the surface it's an abandoned old-brick warehouse district. There's a graffitid skate park, a Jamaican hole-in-the-wall caterer. It would make for a great film set. But in the imposing factory of a building over the road lurks The Studio, the school - and it looks as little like a school on the inside as it does on the outside. There's exposed brickwork, pipework and chunky wooden beams. There's a sloping cinema room with big red comfy seats for assemblies and films. There's an arcade machine, free breakfast, even a crypt. Why did my schools have to look like asylums? Even "The Studio" name is cool.

The students file in at 9am and they're a smart lot, all blazers and business attire, all conscientious looking - no trainers instead of shoes, no ties tucked away in hard-man defiance. They're aged between 14 and 19 years old. Today is games day. That's not every day (more on that later), but today they show returning mentors how far they are with their games. And it's impressive stuff.

Earlier this week we detailed the story of Bryan Henderson, the 20-year-old man who won Peter Molyneux's iOS app, Curiosity, upon which he was promised to be the god of the studio's next game, Godus, and receive a portion of its revenue. Instead, all he got was a stupid T-shirt.

Super Stardust developer Housemarque's recent PS4 opus Resogun was described by many as a modern update to Eugene Jarvis' 1981 arcade game Defender. And now the developer is working with Jarvis himself on its next game.

For the uninitiated, Eugene Jarvis not only created Defender, but Robotron, Smash TV, Narc and Blaster as well. He's kind of a big deal.

This is Jarvis' first collaboration with an outside studio since he worked with Midway Games on Cruis'n USA in 1994.

Woah Dave! is an unmissably strange arcade game that's currently available on just about everything. It's pretty easy to get into, but it has a weird twist to the hi-score formula that I've genuinely never seen in a game before. So I asked the developers how it came about.

Better yet, it's getting a complete overhaul to look and play nicer than ever on the new platforms.

Dubbed Badland: Game of the Year Edition, this remastering will feature hand-painted graphics, redesigned controls to work with an analogue stick and triggers, and four times the content of the original game when it launched. This bulky product will consist of 100 single-player stages, 100 co-op levels, and 27 multiplayer maps that support up to four-player local multiplayer.

Clock Tower creator Hifumi Kono has launched a Kickstarter for NightyCry, the spiritual successor to his point-and-click horror franchise. Better yet, the crowdfunding campaign contains plenty of footage of the game in action.

Like the Clock Tower games of yore, NightCry will be controlled with a minimalist point-and-click interface. Players will assume the role of a blonde woman wearing impractically loud heels as she tries to survive a night aboard a luxury cruise liner haunted by a mysterious figure brandishing a colossal pair of scissors.

Players wont be able to fight the monster, so instead they must hide and run from it.

The gargantuan Japanese company saw an 89bn yen (£500m) profit for the third quarter ending 31st December 2014. That's up from a 26.4bn yen (£148m) profit during the same period last year.

The Game and Network Services division, which runs PlayStation, saw an operating income of 27.6bn yen (£155m) for the quarter. That figure was fuelled by an impressive 6.4m PlayStation 4 units shipped to shops and a whopping 147m game sales. The same period last year, 4.5m PS4s and 128m games were sold, and the Game and Network Services division saw a 12.4bn yen (£69m) operating income.

It's been more than fifteen years since Grim Fandango, Tim Schafer's beloved tale of the dead, was originally released, but this week sees the title resurrected for PC, Mac, PlayStation 4 and Vita. If you missed it the first time around, you owe it to yourself to take advantage of this second chance to experience the game.

Visually the game's been given a fresh lick of paint, but the late 90s gameplay remains entirely unchanged from the original. What that means in practise is that the feast of interconnecting puzzles contain more than a few morsels that are difficult to digest. Should you find yourself frustrated, we've got a year-by-year walkthrough that will lead you through even the most obscure elements of the game.

There's a line in the new Grim Fandango Remastered's Director's Commentary that sums it up perfectly: "When you're making something, it should be something that only has been made by you, at the time you made it, in the place you made it." More than most games, never mind adventures, it's impossible to imagine any other team having made the original. It's a credit to every member of it that if this new Remastered edition doesn't seem to have changed all that much, it's because there really wasn't much in need of updating. Like the film noir classics it borrows from, it looked and sounded great at release, and still holds onto its style.

There's no arguing Grim Fandango's pedigree. It's one of the most beloved adventures of all time, and one of the few deemed worthy of sharing a VIP room with the likes of Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle. For the most part, it deserves that. Main character Manny Calavera in particular is easily one of Lucasarts' finest creations; a grim reaper/travel agent for the dead on a four year journey through the underworld in search of the woman whose destiny he lost. His Art Deco world of Mexican papier-mâché dolls is a work of creative genius, from the Brazil style technology of opening city El Marro to the moonlit waters of Rubacava. Every scene is lovingly rendered, every piece of music so good that it's impossible to imagine anything else going in its place, every conversation sparkles with wit and warmth. Some details of the plot are best not thought over too carefully, especially the nature of Manny's job and trying to do Glengarry Glen Ross in a world where the best clients are given freebies for their good lives, but hey. The heart and style of it easily papers over those pesky cracks.

Grim Fandango Remastered wisely doesn't mess with any of this, avoiding any heavy-handed modernisation like the updates that made the original Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition such a pile (the sequel was better). Instead, it increases the texture quality so that characters are as sharp as they should be, adds a few lighting effects that aren't particularly dramatic but don't hurt, and introduce a point-and-click interface to go along with the original's tank controls (plus a certain pointed achievement if you play through it the old fashioned away). This annoyingly can't distinguish between 'use this' and 'use item on this' though, so you still have keep putting things away to interact with them, and go to a separate screen to check and select inventory items. One puzzle, involving pulling levers, had me at the keyboard before a solution would work. Those are are very minor irritations though.

Grim Fandango is finally being re-released tomorrow after being stuck on CDs since its October 1998 launch. Never available for console or digital download, many thought the cult classic would remain a rare collector's item for adventure game enthusiasts. When a special edition of LucasArts' arguably best-known adventure, The Secret of Monkey Island, came out in the summer of 2009, it led many to believe that Grim Fandango would follow. Yet years went by without so much as a whisper of a re-release. When Disney acquired Lucasfilm on Grim Fandango's 14th anniversary in 2012, many thought it was a lost cause. Disney is notorious for its family-friendly fare, so a tale of crime and corruption with liberal use of drinking, smoking and sexual innuendo didn't exactly fit the house of mouse's modus operandi.

Yet here we are, over 16 years later, with Grim Fandango remastered for a modern audience. What happened? And why did it take so long?

Speaking to Grim Fandango's project leader, Tim Schafer, it was simply a matter of him being inundated with other projects at his studio Double Fine Productions. "One of the main reasons it took so long is I've been busy with other things, making new games and pursuing other stuff," he tells me over Skype. "I've always been interested in some day going back to the old properties, but we've been pretty busy."

Tokyo Twilight Ghost Hunters, the upcoming visual novel/RPG hybrid from the developers of Deadly Premonition, is now slated for a 13th March release in Europe on Vita and PS3, publisher NIS America has announced.

North Americans will receive it that same week on 10th March.

Tokyo Twilight Ghost Hunters' story focuses on a new transfer student at a high school that secretly specialises in ghost hunting, a la Persona 3. Like Atlus' cult classic, Tokyo Twilight Ghost Hunters will feature turn-based combat, though it will be portrayed from a first-person perspective.

Only in politics is the post of second-in-command considered a punchline. Here, unlike in sport or war, Vice President (or, indeed, Deputy Prime Minister) is the ultimate embodiment of the near miss - evidence of a grasp for power that fell just a little short, which, it turns out, is the precise distance necessary for tragi-comedy. The Veep is presented in both fiction and media as the arch-loser, a person whose ludicrous ambition outstripped their achievement, making them the perfect candidate for our scorn (and, perhaps, the perfect distraction from our own personal fears and failures).

If exaggeration leads to comedy, then Citizens of Earth goes all in: you're cast as vice president of the world. This is failure on the grandest of all scales then, a joke that's made all the better by the fact that you still live with your mother and brother and, for much of the game, simply wander the streets of your hometown and its surrounding area carrying out errands for the locals. The comedy comes from the juxtaposition of premise and reality. At the beginning of the game you wake in your childhood bed (a Japanese RPG cliché familiar to every Chrono Trigger veteran) as the newly elected second-in-global-command. The game's first boss? A creature lurking in the basement of the local coffee shop, Moonbucks, who has stolen the coffee beans and must be defeated in order to ensure that the young barista can keep her job.

The game's developer, Eden Industries - a young Canadian studio whose team includes artists and designers who worked on Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, Mario Strikers Charged and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon - understands the appeal of the mundane when set against a world-saving context. Perhaps it's a lesson learned from those days spent with Nintendo. After all, Nintendo's Earthbound remains one of the most powerful and best-loved RPGs, and much of its enduring power derives from the way in which it explored the mystery and menace of American suburbs. In the same way, Citizens of Earth celebrates the rhythm and texture of small town life. You bicker with the newly defeated opposition leader. You chase after wanted criminals for the local police. You help a local journalist take pictures of a car that's fallen into a lake for a story she's working on. You inspire the town mascot to rediscover his school spirit.

Spelling matters. Take, by way of a convenient example, the word "woah". A slang term, popularised by the great sage Keanu Reeves, it is used to express surprise, delight and excitement. However, shuffle those same letters around a little and you get "whoa", which is horse language for "stop".

Spelling matters. As the title suggests, Woah Dave is a game very much designed around the Keanu-approved version of the word. This is a game that surprises, delights and excites. Woah indeed. In contrast, should you attempt to play according to the second equine-skewed spelling, you will suffer badly. This is not a game where stopping is recommended. This is a game where to stop means pretty much instant death.

Woah Dave is a single screen confection which reaches back to the very dawn of arcade gaming for its inspiration. Playing as Dave Lonut, a short and square little fellow who looks not unlike a minimalist pixel art version of Sesame Street's Bert, you must hop from platform to platform while eggs drop from the sky. After a short delay these eggs hatch into monsters, and every time a monster hits the lava at the bottom of the screen, it evolves into a new enemy type.

Gaming analyst group NPD has revealed the top 10 highest selling games in the US retail market.

Unsurprisingly, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare took first place. What's more suprising is that last year's lackluster Call of Duty: Ghosts still managed to scratch this year's top 10, if only at the number 10 position.

It also may surprise a few folks that Destiny and Grant Theft Auto 5 were only in third and fourth place respectively, as Madden NFL 15 took the honour of runner-up to Call of Duty's throne.